1. Field of the Invention
The invention concerns the administration of printing devices in a network environment. In particular, the invention concerns the creation and management of print queues corresponding to printing devices connected on a network.
2. Incorporation by Reference
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/664,531, entitled “Object-Based Architecture For Supporting Network Devices,” filed Sep. 18, 2000, is incorporated by reference as if fully set forth in full herein.
3. Description of the Related Art
The administration of printing devices in a network environment is typically a tedious and time consuming task for network administrators. In particular, for large and complex network environments having several local servers, there may be a large number of printers distributed throughout the network. Network administrators must not only install new printing devices on the network, they must also create and manage the print queues associated with the printing devices and facilitate network users connecting to and utilizing the printing devices.
In large computer networking environments, the administrative tasks required to create and configure print queues associated with printing devices connected to the network can be demanding. For example, when creating a print queue for a printing device, a network administrator generally must manually enter information such as the address assigned to the printing device, the particular type of printing device, and the configuration or capabilities of the printing device. As the number of printing devices increases, the time and effort required to obtain the needed information and create and configure the necessary print queues can become excessively burdensome.
Once a print queue has been created and configured for a particular printing device, network users may begin utilizing the printing device by locating and connecting to the desired print queue, and installing any necessary print drivers. However, searching for the desired print queue often requires the network user to search lists of print queues on multiple network servers. In networking environments employing a large number of servers, finding a desired print queue can be confusing and very time consuming.
As printing devices within an existing computer network are relocated or reassigned addresses, typically a network administrator must update the configuration stored for the respective print queues to reflect any change of address on the network. Additionally, if the name of a print queue is changed, all user workstations using that particular print queue must be updated with the new name or the user workstations will lose their connection to the printing device. As the size of the computer network increases, updating print queue configuration information and ensuring all workstations have updated print queue names becomes very time consuming.